Quartz Hill High School starts from 7:30 AM and ends at 2:53 pm. That means that students spend 7 hours and 23 minutes in school. That is excluding the time it takes to get to school, any zero period classes, any extracurricular activities, and any tutoring hours. If that student joins a club, the marching band, or a sports team, they will likely get home around 6:00. If the person is a hard-working IB or AP student with SATs and college applications coming up, he or she will barely have any time to work on homework.

   This hectic schedule is why students need to have their homework done in class and have the actual learning and studying done at home. This will not happen unless teachers start to use effective teaching methods instead of giving out “busy work” to their already busy students. The current method of learning puts an extreme amount of pressure on the students which ends up harming both their mental and physical health.

   Students should not necessarily receive less homework; instead, they should receive less “busy work”, have time during school hours to take care of homework, and be given more effective teaching techniques. This is supported by a study that shows that the United States of America was ranked 29th in public education. Korea and Japan were ranked much higher; this is due to the fact that much of USA’s education system focuses on grades and test scores rather than students actually learning the material. America is more concerned about finishing the assignment than actually learning what it was supposed to teach students.

   As stated in the article “In the Classroom with Brad Kuntz” by none other than Brad Kuntz himself, “[the] past decades of education have trained students and teachers to focus on grades rather than learning. Unfortunately, grades are generally an account of points earned through various activities that are influenced by artificial deadlines, grade inflation, extra credit, and subjectivity. It’s time for us to . . . empower [students] to take charge of their learning and measure their own success.” As this statement suggests, students need to actually learn the material rather than just breezing through the assignment. This comes back to actually learning the material rather doing busy work. We should either not receive homework to waste time or get enough time during school to take care of it. Otherwise, we will fall behind, and that is definitely not the type of education we want!